Ubuntu: next target video game market

The publisher Canonical, developing GNU / Linux distribution Ubuntu, hopes to increase its efforts to receive new video games and thus dense its user base.

In July, the publisher confirmed that Valve’s Steam gaming platform is focused on the distribution Ubuntu and last month we learned that a closed beta will be launched with 1,000 players in the month of October. The company Canonical would however go further and moved closer to NVIDIA, AMD and Intel.

Commending the efforts of Valve and Electronic Arts, Bryce Harrington, manager at Canonical, said on his personal blog that the lack of commercial games is long overdue to Ubuntu. He added that the company is working with NVIDIA to optimize graphics drivers needed for compatibility most advanced games. “We must be careful to deploy changes to drivers not to regress to some users,” says Harrington. Canonical has established a specific mechanism with the help of Valve.

The publisher will provide a set of experimental drivers developed by NVIDIA, which will be accessible from the hardware manager. A first version (nvidia-experimental-304) is already available in the trial, which will be followed by a beta (nvidia-experimental-310). The company also wants to offer a beta version of AMD fglrx drivers but work has not started yet. Finally Intel has also put together packages updates. Meanwhile, Canonical has corrected the kernel for support for OpenGL 3.0 on Ivy Bridge chips and developed a compression layer S3 mesa library, providing an open source alternative to OpenGL. It was required by Valve. All these efforts should ultimately help increase the number of video games available on Ubuntu. Remember that the next version of the system, Ubuntu 12.10 is scheduled for October 18.